Mapparium

Step onto a glass bridge and the whole world closes around you: the Mapparium is a hollow globe three storeys high, built from 608 panels of stained glass and lit from behind, which visitors cross through its centre along a walkway about 30 feet long. Because the map is seen from inside, every point of the earth's surface is the same distance from the eye, so continents and oceans keep their true proportions instead of being stretched as on a flat chart. Standing at the equator, one has to tilt back to find Europe and North America far overhead.

The globe was conceived by the architect Chester Lindsay Churchill in the early 1930s, while he was designing the headquarters of the Christian Science Publishing Society in Boston, as an emblem of the international reach of The Christian Science Monitor. He had been struck by the large rotating globe in the lobby of New York's Daily News Building. The glass was made by the Rambusch company of New York, following Rand McNally political maps of 1934, and the room opened on 1 June 1935. The map was never redrawn: proposals to update it in 1939, 1958 and 1966 were turned down, partly over cost and partly because the frozen 1935 world had become a historical document in its own right. Siam, Italian East Africa and a world of colonial empires still glow on the glass.

The hard curved surface also produces a remarkable acoustic. Two people standing at opposite ends of the bridge can talk at a whisper as if side by side, and a voice raised at the centre of the sphere returns from every direction at once.

The Mapparium is part of the Christian Science complex in Boston's Back Bay, a district of nineteenth-century brownstone streets laid out on land reclaimed from the tidal flats of the Charles River.

Getting there

The Mapparium is inside the Christian Science Publishing Society building in the Back Bay district of Boston, Massachusetts. Boston Logan International Airport (BOS) is about 7 km away.